Inscribed and expendable: oncological trauma, body memory, and the politics of grievability in Anne Boyer's The Undying

The study examines the thematic resonances and disjunctions between Medical Humanities, Trauma Studies, and Feminist Critical Theory through a close reading of Anne Boyer's Pulitzer Prize-winning pathography The Undying. The research argues that the bodies of female cancer patients experience, remember, and resist oncological violence in contrast to late-capitalist biomedical discourse. Drawing on Bessel van der Kolk's clinical account of implicit, non-declarative body memory, understood here not as a diagnostic claim about Boyer's neurobiology but as a way of reading literary form, the study reads Boyer's syntactically fragmented, recursive prose as both a figuration of chemotherapy-induced somatic violation and a formal strategy to represent what testimony cannot. Judith Butler's analytics of precarity and grievability are essential to this inquiry, illuminating the role of normative biopolitical regimes in allocating institutional protection, therapeutic resources, and public mourning along intersectional axes of gender, ethnicity, and class, rendering certain oncological bodies structurally non-grievable. This reading of the biopolitical investments conditioned by cancer and by its differential histories is further underscored by the World Health Organization's Global Breast Cancer Initiative and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 imperative that oncological treatment be gender equitable and that by 2030 deaths from non-communicable diseases be substantially reduced. Within this context, Boyer's feminist micro-narratives of somatic trauma, chemotherapeutic toxicity, and institutional abandonment stand in transnational epidemiological and humanistic urgency.